rs
of burial-grounds. When these men had lost their situations for
connivance at the stealing of bodies, they naturally joined their old
associates, and became part of the regular gang.

The bribery of the custodians will account for the large number of bodies
often obtained in one night. Had there been the slightest vigilance on the
part of the authorities, it would have been absolutely impossible for the
resurrection-men to have spent the time necessary for their work without
detection. The amount of time required for the work depended greatly on
the soil. One man told Bransby Cooper that he had taken two bodies from
separate graves of considerable depth, and had restored the coffins and
the earth to their former positions in an hour and a half. Another man
said that he had completed the exhumation of a body in a quarter of an
hour; but in this instance the grave was extremely shallow, and the earth
loose and without stones. If much gravel had to be dug through, the
resurrection-men had a peculiar way of using their spades, so that the
gravel was thrown out of the grave quite noiselessly.

On Thursday, February 20th, 1812, the Diary tells us that 15 large bodies
and one small one were obtained from St. Pancras. No doubt this was
simplified by the custom of burying several paupers in one grave. To
obtain these it was necessary to dig all the earth out, so that each
coffin could be dealt with; the men generally worked very soon after a
funeral, and so the earth was much more easily moved than it would have
been if they had been obliged to dig through undisturbed ground. When only
one body was to be had, a small opening was dug down to the head of the
coffin, which was then broken open, and the body was pulled up with a
rope, fastened either round the neck or under the armpits.

In a memoir of Thomas Wakley, the founder of _The Lancet_,[13] the
following account of the _modus operandi_ of the resurrection-men is
given: "In the case of a neat, or not quite new grave, the ingenuity of
the Resurrectionist came into play. Several feet--fifteen or twenty--away
from the head or foot of the grave, he would remove a square of turf,
about eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. This he would carefully put
by, and then commence to mine. Most pauper graves were of the same depth,
and, if the sepulchre was that of a person of importance, the depth of the
grave could be pretty well estimated by the nature of the soil thrown up.
Taki